America, ‘nation of immigrants,’ turns on immigrants: A conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Emma Lazarus wrote these immortal words in 1883 for The New Colossus, the Statue of Liberty that was given to the United States by the French. They are words that generations of us, my family included, grew up seeing as a beautiful ideal and a promise that represented the best of what the United States of America was supposed to be.

But in the Year of our Lord 2025, as immigrant communities are being vilified and terrorized across the country, as Brown people who look like me and my family are being kidnapped off the street by armed masked agents of the state, as due process and are basic civil rights are chucked into the woodchipper so that the US government can abduct human beings and disappear them to black-site prisons in countries they’ve never been to like El Salvador or Libya, as billions of our tax dollars are being allocated for a giant border wall on the US-Mexico southern border, it should be horrifyingly clear that the promised America embodied in the Statue of Liberty is not the America that we live in today.

As the world-renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, writes in a feature peace published by The Nation Magazine, “In Greater America, The New Colossus is the strong man foreshadowed by Ronald Reagan and embodied fully by Donald Trump. Determined to extinguish the lamp that had brought too many migrants, documented and undocumented, into the United States. Many of them came from El Salvador. And in visiting that country, I wanted to understand more intimately how the United States had gone from fighting communism in Vietnam to doing the same in Central America and how this global counterinsurgency effort was intertwined with my own journey from Vietnam to the United States of America as a refugee. This war against communism had ultimately produced me as an American.”

Nguyen continues, “If the country feels divided now and even feels changed beyond recognition for many Americans, whether they be on the left or the right, that too is due to this Jekyll and Hyde distinction between a United States and a Greater America. The glory of the United States was built on possessing this Greater America. But the danger for the United States is that it has now been possessed by this Greater America and everything it represents in terms of domination, doom, and potential self-destruction.”

I’m truly honored to be joined today on The Real News Network by Viet Thanh Nguyen himself. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor of English, American studies, and ethnicity and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. His novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His latest feature piece for The Nation Magazine is titled, Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades. Viet Thanh Nguyen, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News Network today. I really appreciate it. I want to start by just maybe taking a quick step back. Can you talk to us about your recent trip to El Salvador? Tell us about the context surrounding the trip and what you were going there to search for.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Max, thanks so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here with you. Sure. I had always been curious about El Salvador. Because when I was growing up in the United States in the early 1980s, I was reading about what was happening in El Salvador. There was a civil war that was taking place. I was only 10 years old when I was reading these things in Newsweek magazine, for example. So obviously, I was quite confused. I didn’t really know the entire geopolitical context. But I knew that there was something that was happening in that country, something horrible that led to the death of a lot of civilians and priests and social justice advocates and so on and that the United States had something to do with it. And I was a refugee born in Vietnam who had come to the United States in 1975, fleeing from a war that the United States had a great deal to do with and I didn’t really understand that there was a connection between Vietnam and Central America.

But as I grew older and did more investigation into the history of the United States and its wars and so on, it became very clear that there was a very strong connection between American policy in Vietnam and Southeast Asia and American policy in Central America. And in the article, I talk about how that was expressed in Ronald Reagan’s speech from 1983 where he said, “We failed in Southeast Asia containing communism. Central America is the new battlefront for containing communism.” That would be because we had lost Nicaragua to the communists and now, El Salvador was the next front for that. And so, that had always stayed with me. And I didn’t really have a chance to pursue that until this February when I got the opportunity to visit El Salvador because I am a member of the International Rescue Committee, which works with refugees and I wanted to see our operations in El Salvador.

And I thought, “If I was going to go, I would take this opportunity to also look at this other history that had always concerned me,” which is the history of the Civil War and the United States’ role in it. And I arrived on the same day in San Salvador as Marco Rubio who was there on his first international trip as Secretary of the State to file the deportation agreement with President Bukele, whose consequences we are still dealing with. And it seemed to me that that deportation agreement was deeply tied in to the history of the Civil War and its consequences and the larger history of the so-called Cold War that had brought me to the United States.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What were you expecting when you got to San Salvador and how did what you see match up with those expectations?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see in El Salvador. I had never been further south of the American continent except for Mexico. So to me, this was the whole new area to look at. I did expect that El Salvador would be a poor country, a country dealing with various kinds of economic and political and cultural problems. Things that I’d already been very familiar with through my many trips to Southeast Asia and seeing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia over the last 20 years in the ways that they have been coping with the legacies of war and civil war and division and the like and the tension between capitalism and communism.

I think I was surprised when I got to El Salvador and realized that the currency there is the US dollar. I mean, that’s the extent to which the influence of the United States has permeated El Salvador. And I’d done a little bit of reading and research obviously in advance of the trip. And I was well aware of the tensions that El Salvador was undergoing, the most notable of which is… Or, due to this relatively new president, Nayib Bukele, who came to power in 2022. Promising to put an end to the deep problems around crime and gangs that El Salvador was definitely experiencing. Many Salvadorans were upset and deeply concerned about their own safety due to this significant problem and Bukele came in promising to abolish the gang problem. And he put 80,000 people in prison from 2022 onwards without due process, alleging that they were all gang members. At least 7,000 of them were not gang members because they were eventually released and there are major concerns that many more people are not actually gang members.

But this action of declaring a state of emergency and putting 80,000 people away was enormously popular with the El Salvadoran people because it did reduce the gang problem and crime problem and Bukele’s approval rating was around 87%. So this model of authoritarian suppression is something that the United States, I think, is itself learning how to use. And so, I came there trying to see what relationship there was between El Salvador’s model of dealing with crime and scapegoating people and what the United States was doing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And we should mention that and we’ll link to it in the show notes for this episode. I mean, we’ve reported from the streets of El Salvador on Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crackdowns which, as our guest mentioned, have resulted in a wave of popular support because there were real longstanding issues with crime, corruption, violence that have besieged average, poor, and working people in El Salvador for years and decades. And so, if you’re an average, poor, and working person who can suddenly walk down the street without being worried that you’re going to encounter that violence, that’s basically the sum of the equation for many people that we’ve heard from.

But the cost of that is the disappearing of innocent people who are arrested and jailed without due process. Not only people in El Salvador, but now people from the United States who are being disappeared to El Salvador. And I want to kind of pick up on that complex which is at the heart of your piece in The Nation and I even quoted this line of yours in the introduction where you say, “The glory of the United States was built on possessing this Greater America. But the danger for the United States is that it has now been possessed by this Greater America and everything it represents in terms of domination, doom, and potential self-destruction.” So I wanted to ask if you could help us unpack this extremely packed sentence. What are you referring to in this concept of Greater America and how do you see that dynamic unfolding in El Salvador now?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

I arrived in the United States as a refugee. And certainly, this whole idea of the United States welcoming the poor and the wretched and the oppressed was beneficial for my family. We came fleeing from communism which made us very welcome refugees versus refugees who are not fleeing from communism or refugees who are Black. So we were welcomed into the United States. And certainly, this powerful mythological idea of the United States as being a nation of refugees and immigrants was something that was really meaningful for us as Vietnamese refugees.

However, it was very clear, eventually to me, that one of the conditions of our being welcomed as refugees to the United States was that we accept the entire history of the United States and what it represents. And I’ll just give you one illustration, which is that we ended up being resettled through a place called Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, which I had never really questioned the name of that fort, but it was named Fort Indiantown Gap, obviously, because white settlers had built this fortification in order to either defend themselves against Indigenous peoples or to wage war against Indigenous peoples, depending on your point of view.

So the very conditions of being welcomed into the United States and agreeing to this American mythology means also agreeing to the history of conquest and settler colonialism in the United States. Now, that is part of the complexity that I’m referring to when I say that there is a United States that is the official United States and that there is a Greater America which is something a little bit more complicated. So the official United States is this rhetoric that we’re a country of democracy, liberty, equality, freedom, and so on. And there’s a lot of truth to that and many people have benefited from that, including my family. And yet, that United States would not have possible without Greater America. And Greater America, in my idea, is the United States that has been built upon conquest, genocide, enslavement, occupation, perpetual war. This has been with us since the very origins of the country and Greater America cannot be disentangled from the United States.

And what Donald Trump represents when he says, “Make America great again,” is this promise to bring the United States back to a time period when being imperialist, depending on power and violence to settle things. This idea that the United States is always right. That the question of rights and legalities is secondary to the question of the interest of the United States, which Donald Trump conflates with the interests of white people and especially, straight, white men. This is the nostalgic promise of, “Make America great again,” this reference to a Greater America.

And that Greater America has never gone away. It’s in competition with this idea of the United States of America but we cannot act as if these things could be separated. The United States of America has been made possible by Greater America which is why this idea that we’re going to do things like suspend the rule of law in order to deport people is something that has always been there in American history. So while it’s shocking to see it being done today, as you’ve already talked about, we have to remember, the United States has had a long tradition of suspending notions of rights and equality and things like that in order to demonize, to deport, to incarcerate many, many different peoples who are not white.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And there seems to be a critical detail here in the relationship between the United States of America as a geographically bound nation state that we’re living in right now. And this Greater America that expands well beyond our national borders like El Salvador really provides, I think, a critical template for understanding that. Because as we’re talking about here and as we’ve been seeing unfold over the past few months, the United States, through the Trump administration, has brokered this horrifying deal with the Bukele government in El Salvador that allows for the US government to abduct, arrest, deport people from the United States to El Salvador where they will be placed in prisons like CECOT. The most notorious infamous prison where people who have been languishing there, who were deported from here just months ago have had no contact with their family or even legal representatives. They have been disappeared in the most literal sense.

So we have that sort of relationship that allows American violence and power to extend its reach beyond its own borders. While at the same time, the Trump administration has been trying to claim that once those people are in El Salvador, they are beyond the legal scope and reach of the United States which is why they said they could do nothing to facilitate the return of people, like Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Initially. I was wondering if you could help us dig into that queer relationship that America has with Greater America that both allows us to impose our imperialist will but still selectively choose what those countries can do and say to us in response.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

The United States has had a long history, it’s not even a contemporary history, of interfering with other countries that goes all the way back to the very origins. Again, when European settlers arrived in the so-called New World, there were already Indigenous, sovereign nations here. So this policy of conquering other nations and forcing them to do our will, whether we absorb them or we don’t absorb them, has been with us again since the very origins. And after the establishment of the United States as we know it, the continental United States which included half of Mexico, the United States was very interested in continuing to expand its sphere of influence, south of the official border of the United States.

And so, we as Americans have a very long history of forgetting what we have done to other countries all over the world, but especially south of our border. And we have a history of forgetting that what we do there is going to have blowback in terms of what happens here in the United States. So Americans right now, on the average, are responding very viscerally to this idea of immigration and undocumented immigration and alleged gangsters and so on from south of the border as if these problems, if that’s what you want to call them, have come out of nowhere. When in fact, they come out of a very long and deep history of US involvement in and interference with these countries south of our border.

When we talk about El Salvador, we have to go back to the fact that El Salvador has, for a long time, been an oligarchical, colonialist, supremacist regime, built upon the exploitation of the peasantry, will include a lot of Indigenous peoples. And the United States has been fully supportive of that for a very, very long time, whether or not we have had Democratic or Republican presidents in the administration. So we have never been interested in supporting democracy in El Salvador. We’ve always been interested in an unequal regime that is exploitative and that is willing to support American interest in exchange to be allowed to do whatever they want.

This reached a particularly aggravating point in the late 1970s when human rights abuses were so bad that Jimmy Carter wanted to suspend military aid to El Salvador. And El Salvador’s response was not to improve its human rights record, but instead to refuse American aid and turn to Israel to supply 83% of its military needs from the late ’70s to the early ’80s. So the complexities of what’s going on in El Salvador, as you said, are indeed a template for so many of the things that are happening today, both in terms of the United States willing to engage in this deportation regime to an autocratic regime that is always supported to the presence of Israel in terms of supporting, again, these kinds of autocracies. And finally, to this idea that what’s happening in the United States is not simply blowback but the fact that the United States has always been willing to support non-democratic regimes elsewhere is now returning to the United States as it begins to increasingly apply these non-democratic ideals. Not just to minorities and peoples of color, but also to white people which is now, obviously, terrifying a lot of white people.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Can you say a little more about that? About how this is not just blowback from our imperialist exploits in the past but this is something deeper where American imperial might and violence is turning in on itself and immigrant communities, mine and yours. Both of our families came here for different reasons, but for many of the same ideals, and we are now on the firing line of this administration. So can you say a little more about how this is not just a blowback problem, but it’s something deeper?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Right now, I think a lot of Americans are rightfully angry and terrified about what’s happening to this country in terms of the attack on various kinds of constitutional principles like birthright citizenship, for example. Something which Marco Rubio benefited from himself. And certainly, I also benefited from that as being a naturalized citizen. So that kind of thing is, I think… The scale of it is new and so is the scale of attacks on people like journalists and corporations and things like this and on white Americans.

However, everything that’s happening today in the United States has also happened to non-white peoples throughout American history from the very beginning. So this idea that the Constitution, for example, is now going to be attacked in a way that affects the civil and legal and human rights of many Americans. Well, from the very foundations of the country, it was the case that women were excluded from many of the opportunities that the country had, so we’re… Obviously, enslaved Black people in the United States from the very beginning.

So from the very beginning, the United States has always been a country in which this idea of fair and just law has always been highly selective. And if we look at something like the deportation process and the incarceration thing, the process that’s happening today, we see that it’s already happened previously in American history. The 19th century removal, and that’s a polite term, that was done to Indigenous nations where hundreds of thousands of Indigenous peoples were forced to leave their homelands and sent to reservations, many of whom died along in that process, that already foreshadows the deportation and incarceration regime that’s taking place today.

And in the past century, the 20th century, you saw 2 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, many of them citizens, forcibly deported to Mexico. You saw 120,000 Japanese Americans forcibly incarcerated in what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called Concentration Camps. So these things have happened before. They’re not accidental or incidental, they’re structural in American history because the fair and just application of the law has never been fairly and justly applied to non-white peoples.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I know I only have a few minutes left with you and I want to make them count. And I want to return to the question of Greater America and what the future of that Greater America is going to be in the world that we inhabit now. Because, of course, the other side of this and the determination of what the United States and Greater America will look like is going to depend on the position of the United States in the larger geopolitical arena which is changing as we speak. So I wanted to ask like, is what we’re seeing now a sign of a dying American empire or an American empire evolving and still quite powerful more so than we’re giving it credit for?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

I think the United States is obviously still extremely powerful as we just witnessed with the bombing of Iran, for example. So the United States still has an enormous amount of military power that can’t be matched by other countries. However, a healthy empire, if you’re into healthy empires, a healthy empire has to exist through more than just military violence and might, although that’s really important.

Healthy empires are also powerful because they are seductive through their rhetoric, through the mythologies that they export. And the United States has obviously been very successful at that in the second half of the 20th century. And what’s important to note here is that this establishment of an American empire over the course of the 20th century, an American empire that expands beyond the official borders of the United States, that has been a bipartisan project. Democrats and Republicans have agreed to that. Now, they have done that, carried out that imperial project in different ways, especially in relationship to domestic practices within the United States.

But imperialism is bipartisan in the United States. What we witnessed with Donald Trump is a nostalgic imperialism however, that harkens back to the earlier part of the 19th century. And by this, I mean that under a bipartisan Democrat and Republican imperialism of the 20th century, it’s been an imperialism that recognizes the need for soft power that is the exportation of American ideas, of American customs, of American popular culture, of American aid in order to make the United States attractive to other countries.

In the early 19th century, I don’t think the United States was necessarily concerned about that. It was simply an exercise of brutal imperial power to grab as much land as possible and to subjugate people as quickly possible. And I think that’s what a Greater America harkens back to. So Donald Trump does represent something newer in the last later phase of American Empire. He’s what I would call an ugly American versus the quiet Americans that would include people like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, the Bush’s, Obama, Hillary Clinton. They have all sought to exercise hard American power with soft American power and Donald Trump and his administration has decided that soft power is irrelevant. It’s hard power all the way.

That is having serious foreign policy consequences. And of course, those who believe in a benevolent American empire thinks this will spell the end of a benevolent American empire. That could be true. And the outcome of that is unclear to any of us at this point, what that really means. But the rest of the world is moving towards a place where regional powers like Russia, China, North Korea, and so on, are all competing for influence. And giving up soft power for the United States, I think is not good for a benevolent empire, if that’s what you’re interested in. But it’s going to be terrible in terms of global, hard conflict as well and that is something that is quite terrifying, as terrifying as the removal of soft power within the United States. That leads to things like the acceptance of deportations and concentration camps that we’re seeing today erected in places like Florida.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You just mentioned the power of American mythology, like both here at home and exported around the world. I wanted to ask in the last minute that I’ve got you, since I started this segment reading the Emma Lazarus’s poem emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty. Is the ideal of America embodied in that poem, embodied in that statue? Was America ever that and can it ever be?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

I think the United States of America certainly was that and is that. I mean, there are many people, including my own family, who benefited from this idea so I don’t think we can dispose of it. And in our current climate, there’s still enormous political necessity for this mythology, because it is a mythology that will hopefully mobilize enough Americans that we can put a stop to what’s going on from a hard power, far right wing Republican Party. A party that is now completely owned by Trump. So even if Trump goes away at some point, I think the Republican Party in its current mode will continue to regenerate itself in this kind of version. And so, we need all the various political tools at our disposal.

I’m not someone who agrees with this American mythology, but I think it’s a very powerful tool that has political uses that we need to deploy. But America was that, is that, can still be that. But that promise of American benevolence and opportunity has always gone along with the suppression of certain kinds of populations. Their ruthless exploitation domestically has always gone along with an imperialism that has extended all over the world. So for me, in my case, in my novel, The Sympathizer, I have a protagonist who comes to the United States fleeing from the war. And he says, “Well, I’m grateful for American aid, but maybe I wouldn’t have needed American aid if I hadn’t been invaded by the United States in the first place.” And it’s that kind of contradiction that far exceeds the mythology of the United States and it’s that kind of contradiction that I think many Americans have a problem recognizing. And in the long-term, we will have to recognize and deal with this contradiction within the United States if we want to actually reach this idea of a society that is more just and more equal for everyone.